I'm a libertarian lawyer and college professor. I blog on religion, history, constitutional law, government policy, philosophy, sexuality, and the American Founding. Everything is fair game though. Over the years, I've been involved in numerous group blogs that come and go. This blog archives almost everything I write.
Email your questions or comments to rowjonathan@aol.com

Friday, June 15, 2012

Gregg Frazer Interviewed By TGC

Here. You should read the whole thing. But I like where Dr. Frazer discusses David Holmes' thesis:

As the title of my book suggests, my project was to determine the religious beliefs
of the key founders, so I was not very concerned with public
activities---except in cases in which an activity would have been
unpopular or controversial or somehow gives insight into actual belief.
Consequently, my only interest in church attendance is to show some
interest in Christianity and to trace the frequency of church attendance
when the public is watching compared to when it is not.

As for the sacraments, I find Washington's steadfast refusal to take
communion and Hamilton's intense desire to do so after his conversion to
Christ (but not before) to be very informative.

The significance of religious activity and inactivity entirely depends
on the nature of the activity and what it reveals about sincerely held
belief and not on mere frequency or public recognition.

I consider their use of religious language to be absolutely crucial.
There is no other way to get at what they really believed. What language
did they use in public versus private? What terms for God did they
use? Did they use specifically Christian language or generic
"religious" language?

A matter of language that is critically important is to determine what they
meant by certain terms. Too often, for example, Christian America
advocates simply cite quotes in which founders refer to "Christianity"
or "Christian" and leave the false impression with Christian
readers/listeners that those words meant the same thing to the founders
as they do to them. But key founders such as John Adams, Thomas
Jefferson, and Ben Franklin meant something very different by those
words. They created their own versions of "Christianity" that bore very
little resemblance to its actual or common meaning. Other words such
as "bigot" had very different meanings in the 18th century than they do
today and proper understanding requires recognition and explanation of
that fact.

A centerpiece of my argument is my conviction that the terms "Christian"
and "deist" have been so broadly applied to the founders that they've
become virtually meaningless categories. This is largely due to the
fact that those two categories have been the only generally accepted
niches, so individuals have been shoehorned into one of those
identifications whether they fit or not. I carefully define both terms
to provide boundaries that would have been recognized in 18th-century
America in order to produce more accuracy---more truth in labeling.

Holmes's conclusions seem to me to illustrate my point perfectly. While
we do not deal with exactly the same people, Holmes covers five of the
eight persons I class as "key founders." In common with virtually
everyone (except me), he calls Jefferson and Franklin deists. Along
with many scholars, but not necessarily a majority, he also calls
Madison a deist. But his determinations regarding George Washington and
John Adams highlight the "shoehorn" activity mentioned above and
particularly point to the need for my work. He calls Washington a
"Deistic Episcopalian" and Adams a "Christian Deist." In 18th-century
terms, these descriptions are nonsensical---and they do not stand up to
the evidence.